On a sunny day in mid-2020, Malobi Ogbechie stepped off a ferry at Lagos’ Apapa port. He paced the busy port for hours, asking dockworkers how to ship his small batches of fonio, a nutrient-rich West African grain, by sea to save on expensive air freight that was eating into his margins. Unable to afford shipping a full container, he asked around for shippers who allowed cargo sharing with other exporters—groupage, as it’s called. He found none.
Five years later, Ogbechie is no longer a struggling exporter but a founder trying to solve this problem with Kadan Kadan, his logistics startup, which lets small businesses export their goods in shared containers at a fraction of the cost of air freight.
